World class computing and information science research at Strathclyde...

The Strathprints institutional repository is a digital archive of University of Strathclyde's Open Access research outputs. Strathprints provides access to thousands of Open Access research papers by University of Strathclyde researchers, including by researchers from the Department of Computer & Information Sciences involved in mathematically structured programming, similarity and metric search, computer security, software systems, combinatronics and digital health.

The Department also includes the iSchool Research Group, which performs leading research into socio-technical phenomena and topics such as information retrieval and information seeking behaviour.

Abstract

We have derived an approximate analytical expression for the static director distortion of a planar nematic layer subject to a magnetic field H immediately above the critical Fræ#169;edericksz transition H=Hc. The layer contains a voltage-independent density of positively and negatively singly charged ionic species that interact with the flexoelectric and dielectric polarizations which appear when the director is distorted. The analytical solution is shown to correspond closely to a full numerical calculation when H/Hc=1.01. The analytical approach allows a quantitative insight into how the mobile charge shields the polarization for different values of the elastic constants, the ionic density, the flexoelectric coefficients, and the layer thickness.